Nowadays, terminals for electric resistors are produced by performing turning operations on pieces of wire or a rod of copper alloy.
Indeed because of the poor workability of pure copper, and in particular because of the propensity to being used as a material to be turned, it is generally alloyed with tellurium or other materials.
Such alloy of copper and tellurium thus makes it possible to impose a cutting speed that results in profitable productivity, furthermore making it possible to achieve a satisfactory finish of the worked pieces.
However, the technique used today for producing terminals for electric resistors, which consists in turning pieces made from copper and tellurium alloy, exhibits some drawbacks, including the poor economy of the working material, which can be ascribed to the losses of swarf owing to the choice of turning as a technique for forming the terminals.
Furthermore, nowadays copper and tellurium alloy is relatively valuable and hence it costs more, for example, than pure copper.
These drawbacks naturally engender a vicious circle that spurs makers of terminals for electric resistors to find solutions that make it possible to use materials that are less valuable but which have satisfactory performance and/or processes for working these materials which make it possible to achieve a higher level of productivity and a high level of quality of the products, with better economy of materials.